author
Arthur Isaac Fonda
A late 19th-century American surveyor and civil engineer, he wrote about money with the precision of someone used to measuring the physical world. His best-known book, Honest Money, explores how currency, value, and competition shape everyday economic life.
1 Audiobook
Honest Money
by Arthur Isaac Fonda
About the author
Active from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, Arthur Isaac Fonda is identified in library and reference records as an American surveyor, civil engineer, and author. He is best known for Honest Money, a work on monetary theory first published in 1895.
In the preface to Honest Money, he says the book grew out of ideas he had first outlined in an 1893 article for the American Journal of Politics. The book takes a practical, argumentative approach to questions of value, standards of money, and proposed changes to the United States monetary system.
Although not much biographical detail appears to be widely preserved online, the surviving record suggests a technically trained writer who brought an engineer's mindset to economic debate. That combination gives his work a distinctive voice: analytical, reform-minded, and closely tied to the money controversies of his era.